Toshiba Tecra A9-12G review

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Verdict:

Toshiba's Tecra has some appealing features, but is outclassed by the competition. The Tecra has a good screen and impressive battery life, but the poor touch pad and small hard disk count against it. Samsung's R70 is a better buy.

Review Date: 11 Jan 2008

Price when reviewed: £686

Supplier: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop

Reviewed By: Alan Lu

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Tecra comes preinstalled with Windows Vista Business, although you can downgrade to Windows XP Professional Edition using the bundled disc.

The 80GB hard disk is the smallest here, and you'll quickly run out of room if you store a lot of video, music and photos. The Tecra has a serial port, which is useful for owners of older peripherals, but an extra USB2 or FireWire port would have been more useful for most people.

The Tecra has a touch stick and touch pad. The touch pad is jittery, so you may be tempted to use the touch stick, but its buttons feel spongy and unresponsive compared to the touch pad's buttons so neither pointing device is ideal. This is a shame, especially as the keyboard's well-spaced keys are responsive and comfortable to use.

This is one of three laptops here with a matt-finish display. It's not very bright, but colours are reproduced accurately, and both our colour and greyscale transitions looked smooth with only minimal banding.

Performance

The Tecra lasted four hours in our light-usage test. Although this is the longest battery life of any laptop in this group, Samsung's, Lenovo's and HP's laptops weren't far behind.

Although the Tecra has only 1GB of RAM, it still fared well in our Windows benchmarks, coming third overall with a score of 153. Its integrated graphics chip isn't up to playing the latest 3D games, and it failed to run our Call of Duty 2 game test at our default settings.

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